Recently, various operation data of the work machine, e.g., a hydraulic excavator, are collected and the collected data are then used to manage the work machine. For instance, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2000-259729 discloses a system that stores the data collected from a work machine into a database.
The data may be gathered as follows. The data acquired in advance by an operation data recording device installed in each work machine is collected by a user, a service person of the work machine, etc., by means of an external terminal, for instance, a laptop computer. The collected operation data, which has been subjected to data processing such as graphing, is used to manage the machine.
A manufacturer often make the improvement to software (or a program) that is used in the operation data recording device and to software (a program for the external terminal) for collecting the data from the recording device, and a new version is distributed to the users each time the software is improved. The program may be distributed as recorded in a magnetic recording medium. As an alternative, the user may download the program stored in the server on the network.
However, it is troublesome for a distributor to distribute the magnetic recording media to the users. In the case of distributing the program by using the server, on the other hand, it is necessary to contact the user and prompt him to update the program every time the improvement is made. If the update information was not passed to a user for some reasons, the user would continue using the software of the previous version, causing inconvenience.
By the way, the machinery manufacturers wish to use the operation data of the work machine for product development and examination of services. For this purpose, the users are required to supply the operation data having been obtained to the manufacturer, but the sufficient data are not easily gathered due to lack of an advantage for the users to supply the data.
The present invention is to provide an operation data collection system for a work machine in which the latest software can be used at any time for the data acquisition and the acquired data can be easily collected by the maker.